Authors: James Salter
“Vivian and I have separated,” he said.
He felt a twinge of shame, despite himself, as if admitting a failure.
“Oh, my,” Beatrice said.
“Actually, it was her idea.”
“I see. Did she give a reason? What was wrong?”
“I really don’t know the reason. We were just not right for one another.”
“She’ll come back,” Beatrice prophesied.
“I don’t think so.”
There was a silence.
“Is that everything?” his mother asked.
“Everything? I don’t know if it’s everything. Do you mean, is there another man? No. Her mother had a stroke though I’m not sure that has much to do with it. A little, maybe.”
“A stroke? She died?”
“No, she’s in Maryland with her father. Vivian’s helping take care of her.”
“Well, I’m truly sorry,” his mother said, referring to what, he didn’t know.
She was not really sorry, she felt an unworthy joy.
“I hardly knew Vivian,” she said with a tone of regret. “She never let me get close to her. Was it my fault, I wonder? Perhaps I should have tried harder.”
“I don’t know,” he confessed.
He was taking it stoically, Beatrice thought, which might have meant indifference. It would be wonderful if that were the case.
“People deceive you,” she said softly.
“Yes.”
There were things she didn’t know, of course, the letters with their red-and-blue-dashed envelope edges, letters from London,
I spend hours trying to stop thinking about you
. That particular, thrilling letter was still in his pocket. He kept it there so that he could take it out and read it again from time to time, on the street, if he liked, or at his desk.
“Why does mail from Europe take so long?” he asked an old agent at lunch. “The planes fly across in a matter of hours.”
“It didn’t take that long before the war,” the agent said. “A letter took four days, maybe five. You took it down to the ship before it sailed and it was in London, delivered, five days later. With airplanes, we’ve only lost a day,” he said.
The sun was finally shining in London, she wrote. She was really like a lizard, she longed to lie beside a pool with the sun on her or be a frog on a lily pad, not a big frog, just a slim green one able to swim well. She was a good swimmer, he knew—she had told him that.
She wrote lying in bed, having said no to invitations,
I miss you enormously
. To her, he wrote,
I think of you fourteen times a day. I think only, when can I have you again? There is that half hour of waking every morning when I lie silent, bathed in thoughts of you. I can feel your eyes opening, finding me
. He did not know her well enough to express the crude desire he really felt, he longed to but was not yet sure of himself. I love your body, he wanted to write, I’d like to take your clothes off quickly like unwrapping, tearing the paper from a marvelous gift. I’m thinking of you, day-dreaming, imagining. How beautiful you are. My utter darling.
In the end, he wrote these things. He was under the spell of her profile, her brilliant smile, her nakedness, and the wonderful clothes she wore in a privileged, distant world.
You have made me completely alive
, she replied.
That summer he heard that Caroline had died, his mother-in-law, former. He had liked her, the inborn aplomb she had when drunk, which was often. Her voice slurred a little but she rode over it as if it were a fleck
of tobacco on her tongue, as if she could pause and wipe it away with a finger. She had coughed and then fallen, first into silence and then to the floor, where Vivian had found her, but she was dead either then or by the time the ambulance came. Bowman sent a large order of flowers, lilies and yellow roses, which he remembered her liking, but he never had a response, not even a brief note from Vivian.
In October they went to Spain. She had been there before, not with her husband but before she was married, with friends. The English loved Spain. Like all northern peoples they loved southern France and Italy, lands of the sun.
The sky of Madrid was a vast, pale blue. Unlike other great cities, Madrid had no river, the grand avenues with their trees were its river, the Calle de Alcalá, Paseo del Prado. On various corners the police stood with their black hats and dark faces. The country was waiting. Franco, the aging dictator, the victor in the savage civil war that preserved a Catholic, conservative Spain, was still in power though preparing for immortality and death. Not far from the city a monumental tomb was being carved into a granite hillside, the Valley of the Fallen. Hundreds of men, prison laborers, were working to complete the sacred place where the great leader of the Falange would lie for eternity beneath a cross forty stories high, visited by tourists, priests, ambassadors, and until the last of them were gone, the brave men who had fought alongside him. Spain had bright skies but was shadowed. In a bookshop Bowman managed to persuade the cautious owner to sell him a copy of Lorca’s
Romancero Gitano
, which was banned. He read some of it to Enid, who was unimpressed. The Prado was dark, as if it had been neglected or even abandoned, the
masterpieces were hard to see. They ate at a restaurant that bullfighters favored, near the arena, also in others filled with noise and open late, and drank afterwards in the Ritz bar where the barman seemed to recognize Enid though she had never stayed there.
They went to Toledo for a day and then on to Seville, where summer lingered and the voice of the city, as the poet said, brought tears. They walked through walled alleyways, she in high heels, bare-shouldered, and sat in the silent darkness as deep chords of a guitar slowly began and the air itself stilled. Chord after ominous chord, the guitarist immobile and grave until a woman in a chair beside him, till then unseen, raised her arms and with a sound like gunshots began to clap her hands and then cry out in a wild voice a single word,
Dalé!
Over and over she cried,
Dalé, dalé!
urging on the guitar. Slowly at first she began to chant or intone—she was not singing, she was reciting what had always been known, reciting and repeating, the guitar like drums hypnotic and endless, it was the gypsy
siguiriya
, she sang as if surrendering her life, as if calling to death. She was from Utrera, she cried, the place Perrate was from, the place Bernarda and Fernanda …
Her hands were up near her face, clapping sharply and rhythmically, her voice was anguished, she was singing in blindness, her eyes closed, her bare arms, silver loops in her ears and long dark hair. The song was her song but it belonged to the Vega, the wide plain with its sun-dark workers and shimmering heat, she was pouring out life’s despair, bitterness, crimes, her clapping fierce and relentless, a place called Utrera, the house in which it had happened, the lover left for dead, and a man in black pants and long hair suddenly came from the darkness, his steel-tipped heels exploding on the wood floor and his arms hung above his head. The woman was singing with even greater intensity amid the relentless chords, the savage, tight beat of the heels, the silver, the black, the man’s lean body bent like an S, the dogs trotting in darkness near the houses, the water running, the sound of the trees.
They sat afterwards in a bar open to the narrow street, barely speaking.
“What did you think?” he said.
She replied only, “My God.”
Afterwards in the room he began to kiss her wildly, her lips, her neck. He slipped the dress straps from her shoulders. You could never have
anyone like this. His old, fettered life was behind him, it had been transformed as if by some revelation. They made love as if it were a violent crime, he was holding her by the waist, half woman, half vase, adding weight to the act. She was crying in agony, like a dog near death. They collapsed as if stricken.
He woke as the light was hitting the frail lace curtains. The bath restored him. She was still sleeping, not even breathing, it seemed. He looked at her in wonder. As he stood there, her hand came slowly out from the sheets and touched against him, then pushed the towel aside and closed gently around his cock. She lay gazing without a word. It had begun to swell. A small, transparent drop fell to her skin and she raised her wrist and licked it.
“I married the wrong man,” she said.
She lay face down and he knelt between her legs for what seemed a long time, then began to arrange them a little, unhurriedly, like setting up a tripod. In the early light she was without a flaw, her beautiful back, her hips’ roundness. She felt him slowly enter, she reached beneath, it was there, becoming part of her. The slow, profound rhythm began, hardly varying but as time passed somehow more and more intense. Outside, the street was completely silent, in adjoining rooms people were asleep. She began to cry out. He was trying to slow himself, to prevent it and make it go on, but she was trembling like a tree about to fall, her cries were leaking beneath the door.
They woke after nine with the sun full on one wall. She came back from the bathroom and got in bed again.
“Enid.”
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you something practical?”
“What do you mean?”
“I haven’t been using anything,” he said.
“Well, if anything should happen … if anything should happen, I’d say it was his.”
“When men are having affairs, do they still sleep with their wives?”
“I would think, yes, but not in this case. He hasn’t as much as touched me for a year. More than a year. I suppose you can tell.”
“That’s disappointing. I thought it was me.”
“It is you.”
Outside, the sun was pouring down. In the great cathedral the remains of Columbus in an elaborate coffin were held aloft by statues of the four kings, of Aragon, Castile, León, and Navarre, and in the treasury there was still gold and silver that had come from the New World.
Seville was the city of Don Juan, Andalusia, the city of love. Its poet was García Lorca, dark hair, dark brows, and a pointed face like a woman’s. He was homosexual and an angel of the re-awakening of Spain in the 1920s and ’30s, books and plays filled with a pure, fatal music, and poems rich in colors with fierce emotion and despairing love. He was born in a wealthy family, but his sympathies and love were for the poor, the men and women who worked all their lives in the burning fields. He grew to scorn the church that did little for them, a playwright and friend of the gypsies whose first love was music and who played the piano in his room upstairs in the house just outside town. His color was green and also silver, the color of water at night and of the immense fertile plains that it irrigated and made rich.
The fame of the poet, when it appears, is like no other, and this happened to Lorca. He was killed in 1936, at the very start of the civil war, arrested and executed by right-wing countrymen and buried in an unmarked grave he was made to dig for himself. His offense was everything he had written and stood for. The destruction of the finest is natural, it confirms them. And for death, as Lorca said, there is no consolation, which is one of the beauties of life.
Among the greatest of the poems was the dirge for the death of his friend, a bullfighter who had retired but then returned to the ring as an homage and tribute to his brother-in-law, the great Joselito. In a tight, embroidered suit, perhaps a bit too tight, he was performing in a provincial ring when a cry rose from the crowd. The sharp, curved horn of the bull had ripped like a knife through the fitted pants and the white flesh beneath.
Two days after being gored,
lily flowers around the green groin
, Ignacio Sánchez Mejias died in a hospital in Madrid where he had insisted on being taken. In deep liturgical sounds like the tolling of bells, the famous lament begins.
A las cinco de la tarde
, at five in the afternoon. The heat is still staggering. The doomed man, still in a ripped suit, is lying in the small infirmary.
At five in the afternoon.
The lines repeat themselves and roll on. A boy is bringing a white sheet, at five in the afternoon. The bed is a coffin on wheels, at five in the afternoon. From far off the gangrene is coming, at five in the afternoon. His wounds are burning like suns, at five in the afternoon, and the crowd is breaking the windows.
You lived, said Lorca, by dying and being remembered. Mejias’ death, in 1934, was like an apprenticeship for his own, prefigured but not yet known. The fierce storm that would tear the country apart was already gathering. The boy with the white sheet was coming, the bucket of quicklime was ready, and the smoothed-over dirt of the bull ring was already in shadows.
He read the
Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejias
aloud for the first time to a roomful of gypsies during Holy Week and slept that night in the huge white bed of a gypsy dancer,
the solitary rose of your breath on my cheek
.
They ate, that day, in a restaurant over a bar, with narrow stairs up which the waiters had to come with their trays. It was open to the air, there were no walls, only a roof of canvas. They were seated to one side, but to be with her was to be seen by everyone. The river, flowing slowly, was beneath them.
“What are
almejas
?”
“Where do you see that?”
“Here,” he said.
“Almejas a la Casera.”
“No idea.”
They ordered fried whitings, little fish, and potatoes. Even through the canvas there was the warmth of the sun. All the tables were filled, one with a party of Germans who were laughing.
“That’s the Guadalquivir,” Bowman said, pointing down.
“The river.”
“I like names. You have a very nice name.”
“The notorious Mrs. Armour.”
“I also like putting my hands on you.”
“Yes, I know.”
“You do?”
“Mm.”
They went on to Granada. The sunbaked country floated past the
window of the train, through his own reflection. There were hills, valleys, thousands upon thousands of olive trees. Enid was sleeping. Perhaps from a dream or something unknown there was a faint, childlike snore, once only. She had never seemed more serene.